5.21.2007

Here's the piece at Truthout, but I'd call it more like treason that a mere violation of the records act.

Three years ago, Robert Luskin, the attorney who defended White House Political Adviser Karl Rove in the CIA leak case, made a startling discovery: a July 2003 email Rove sent to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley that proved Rove was far more involved in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and the campaign to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, than he had let on during interviews with federal investigators and in testimony before a federal grand jury.

Curiously, the email Rove sent to Hadley that Luskin had found never turned up during an exhaustive document search ordered a year earlier, in September 2003, by Alberto Gonzales. At the time, Gonzales, who was White House counsel, enjoined all White House staff members to turn over any communications pertaining to Plame Wilson and her husband, a vocal critic of the Iraq war, who had accused the Bush administration of twisting pre-war Iraq intelligence. Gonzales's order to turn over documents and emails came 12 hours after former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card had informed him that the Justice Department was launching an investigation into the leak.

The order Gonzales sent to Karl Rove and other administration officials demanded "documents that relate in any way to a contact with any member or representative of the news media about Joseph C. Wilson, his trip to Niger in February 2002, or his wife's purported relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency."

The Rove/Hadley email was not included in the thousands of pages of documents turned over to the FBI. The reason? Apparently the "right search words weren't used," Luskin told Newsweek in October 2005. The email Rove sent to Hadley in July 2003 has never been released publicly. It's unclear whether the email was sent via the White House computer system or from Rove's email account maintained by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which, according to the National Journal, is what Rove uses to conduct 90 percent of his White House business, in what would appear to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.